Keep telling yourself, like a mantra, "Science can be cool, science can be cool." The good news is that, in this book, science is cool. Like Henrietta Lacks herself, as well as author Rebecca Skloot, you may be in for an uphill climb when it comes to teaching this text, but we know that you're up for the challenge. First off, Skloot does not shy away from controversy here, from tackling past and present racism in our country, to explicitly describing experimentation on minorities, prisoners, and the mentally challenged—most done without informed consent. Ouch. There's plenty of material to make your students' eyes bug out as well as to initiate their gag reflexes when they learn the ugly truth about parts of our scientific community's past that we're not exactly proud of, to say the least.

On top of that, there's a good deal of sex talk—not in the steamy, sexy sense of the word, but the kind of stuff that might make a few of your students feel a bit uncomfortable. Henrietta did have cervical cancer after all, so it'd be pretty tough to totally avoid discussing lady bits in the book. In addition, Skloot discusses some nasty STDs—contracted due to infidelity (We're looking at you, Day Lacks) as well as "in the name of science." (We call shenanigans, Tuskegee Syphilis Study.)